Public Policy is social agreement written down as a universal guide for social action. We at The Policy ThinkShop share information so others can think and act in the best possible understanding of "The Public Interest."

Same-Sex Marriage: Public Life — The Policy ThinkShop reflects and comments

People are all deserving of dignity and happiness. We live in a society that’s supposed to make it happen. Well…. happiness within reason. Perhaps Norman Rockwell’s four freedoms. Perhaps those four are not enough?

All men are created equal, it’s just that we have all not evolved equally. Hmmm… That’s a loaded statement. Let us clarify.

Women and men of voting age in our society have full citizenship rights. Which is to say, they theoretically have the right to understand and exercise their rights. However, we know that the plying field is not leveled and that we all have differing resources in our pockets, sort of speak. So even rights must be moved if you will with resources. If rights are theoretically equal the exercising of those rights is not.

America continues her journey in the pursuit of her nobility of values: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

For America, as a metaphorical entity, this makes perfect sense. But for a divided, fractured and haunted by racial, gender and economic diversity America, it is quite something else.

Noble values and pursuits aside, our American family is trying to get along and it is acting like a typical family–bickering, blaming, competing and demanding.

The difference here, though, is that yet another segment of our polity is claiming that it is alienated from the whole–that it needs legal remedies in order to ensure its proper place and, perhaps most importantly, the full exercise of its citizen status under our framework of laws and rights. “Our framework of laws and rights?” Indeed, if by “our” we do not mean the entire polity then it seems meaningless to say that we are one nation. And so it goes that our citizenry is divided because our laws, our economic way of life and our burgeoning diversity seem inadequate for a nation that clamors for more in the face of world recession, political division, perpetual war, a broken healthcare system, and a global security problem that threatens to let drones loose in our backyards… Hmmm…. wait a minute, it already has.

What is essentially a tax, health coverage and inheritance problem is now morphing into the next semantically charged issue that will mobilize the next electorate and shape our political future in ways that go well beyond civil rights issues here at home. But our house seems ever more divided and our ability to clamor for more “from a broken house” is akin to the lung filled screams of a baby, saying: “MAMA! I want more!” Perhaps naively groups form, put together leadership and a voice and clamor in the public square, the courts in this case, for their dignity and their dollars. Others have clamored, have achieved their screams in legal code and yet are left wanting… Yet here we go again–like The Who song goes…

“The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two landmark same-sex marriage rulings, one striking down a major provision of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the other leaving uncertain the fate of California’s Proposition 8, the 2008 ballot initiative that prohibits gay and lesbian couples in the state from …”

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In seemingly endless times of “trash talk” that led to an improbable and unpopular political victory, the newly minted president clamors: “Now arrives the hour of action.” Fleeting relief comes to the nation as the transition […]

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